Performance Claire Tolan & The Shush Choir

US/DE

Claire Tolan is an artist and programmer based in Berlin, who focuses exploring human-computer interaction, online communities (intimacy, privacy), and information structures and theory. Born 1986 in Ohio, USA, Tolan studied Literature at the University of Chicago and Archival Science and Human-Computer Interaction at the University of Michigan.

She has worked in nonprofit publishing ventures and archives across the United States, including the Newberry Library, the Poetry Foundation, Copper Canyon Press, Early English Books Online, and the Yosemite National Park Archives. Tolan moved to Berlin in 2013 to work as a web developer with the Tactical Technology Collective, an organisation that helps political activists develop strategies for data manipulation and management.

In 2014, Tolan created “You’re Worth It,” a show on Berlin Community Radio that explores the sounds and culture of ASMR, Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response. The show has led to collaborations with several artists, including Holly Herndon and d3signbur3au.

Claire Tolan predicts SHUSH, a nascent fork of ASMR, and develops strategies for the deployment of SHUSH upon its arrival in our world. SHUSH will come as an answer to the crippling sublime that the individual experiences in the face of complex, planetary-scale systems — climate (and its change), finance, computing, etc — and the catatonia that this sublime produces.

SHUSH will reformat our brains and our megastructures; it will refactor our systems. SHUSH demands the end of this world, and the inauguration of the next one. And yet, for now, there it remains, hanging on the horizon, always approaching but never arriving, crystalised as a to-come. SHUSH is left-behind even as it becomes later and later for its scheduled appointment. What is up with SHUSH?